


The Spirit of Enquiry

by breathedout



Category: Carmilla - J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Genre: Consent Issues, F/F, For Science!, Grief, Incest (kind of), Manipulation, Suicide mentions, Vampires, affectionate about eating and drinking... other people, and also less... death-like... than in canon, and also what's sex and what's dinner it's all very confusing, but definitely something of an amoral take on her, character death is canonical, characters who definitely have their own agendas, characters who may be paranormal projections, dreams which may be visions, in other words, lies and the liars who tell them, like they're vampires so what does "mother" even mean really, not exactly dark!Laura
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-09 09:03:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8884963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: On the full moon after I finished the second lure we walked out at night. My heart beat against the little charm, where it was pinned inside the bodice of my dress. I held my father's hand. The bright arms of Mademoiselle De Lafontaine flashed as she gestured in speech to Madame Perrodon. I could scarce breathe; the moon shone on the winding path and the schloss and the little stream and the beech leaves darkly waving; and then she came. (A one-thing-additional AU in which Laura is Dr. Frankenstein. Only instead of the galvanizing power of electricity, she has vampires. And instead of chickenshit abandonment of in-progress experiments, she has follow-through. Also she is a lot more interested in women.)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Violsva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Violsva/gifts).



> Hey Violsva! First of all, I um—I hope you won't be scared off by the warnings; I wouldn't have written anything involving that particular combo as a Yuletide gift except that (a) it's all canon-typical and (b) there is a lesbian happy(ish) ending, albeit an ambiguous one, to replace (sort of) a lesbian tragic death. I also tried to keep the incest to the absolute bare minimum while still doing what that scene needs to do. Basically, this is as life-affirming and politically empowering as I could make _Carmilla_ while only adding to and reinterpreting, rather than subtracting from, the events that actually take place in the novella. I like to think it keeps the Gothic atmosphere while adding, like, proto-ladies-in-STEM.
> 
> In any case, it's something I've been wanting to do for a while, so thanks for giving me the opportunity, and I hope you enjoy. <3
> 
> Many thanks to [greywash](http://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/pseuds/greywash) for basically keeping me alive over the past few months, god, where would I be without her; and also, less crucially but still much appreciated, for betaing this monstrosity with her customary insight. Also thanks to [beyonces_fiancee](http://archiveofourown.org/users/beyonces_fiancee/pseuds/beyonces_fiancee) for a helpful consult about Alpine botany.

## 1871

On the full moon after I finished the second lure we walked out at night. My heart beat against the little charm, where it was pinned inside the bodice of my dress. I held my father's hand. The bright arms of Mademoiselle De Lafontaine flashed as she gestured in speech to Madame Perrodon. I could scarce breathe; the moon shone on the winding path and the schloss and the little stream and the beech leaves darkly waving; and then _she_ came. 

I believe I knew. Even at the first clatter of horses' hooves: I knew it but I was afraid to believe. And the carriage sped 'round the curve in the road; and it swerved; and it struck a beech-root and it tipped; and with a great scraping and crashing sound it smashed to earth. My breath dammed up in my throat. She must stop with us, I thought, and then: what if it is not her, after all. What if it is simply some unlucky traveler? A quite ordinary girl, like myself? My hand to my breast. It would be. It must be. My father must, he must invite her in. 

She unfolded herself from the carriage. It was she. Her height; her hands. Her manner of holding herself: as if, even when not in motion, she knew without thinking whither next she would fly. Her low, self-sure voice, as she directed her servant to lift a slight and insensible form from the carriage, and lay it on the grass: I had never before heard it, yet still, somehow, it confirmed her in my eyes. Pale in the moonlight she stood; and I, facing her at last, not twenty feet away. Riven, washed by the moonlight, I felt us alone on the path; in the town; in all of Styria. 

But when she spoke, it was to my father.

 _Her child_ , she said. She motioned with her long hand to the figure at rest on the grass. _A journey of life and death_ , she said. _I must leave her, Monsieur_. _I must leave you_ , I heard, and would have cried out but my voice caught in my throat. _I cannot_ , she said, _I dare not delay_. She gestured; paced; my father listened and I, rooted to the ground, pressed hard at the charm under my dress. A host of impossible notions crowded my mind: I might secret myself in her carriage. Without her knowledge I might take the place of her insensible daughter. I might beg or bribe her servant, to what purpose I knew not. Perhaps I was weeping. I'd have sworn an oath that my breast, under my pressing fingers, turned warm and wet.

Then I could think only: her daughter, she calls the girl. If she leaves her daughter, she must come back for her. I will see her again, and then— _daughter_. What must such a term mean? Perhaps—it was necessary—my father, my father must invite the daughter, now; and at last I made my feet to move, and my lips to entreat him; and when I opened my mouth to say 'Oh Papa, pray ask her to stay with us!' she turned her gaze to me, at last. She took me in: slight and shivering in the Styrian night. Listing toward her like a plea. 

'Do.' I said it to her; straight to the heart of her. 'Oh do, pray.'

She gave me a smile, and then took it away. She took away her gaze, and then took away her face; and then, turning to the repaired carriage, took away her presence; and then her carriage; and everything except her daughter, entrusted to my keeping. 

My limbs felt weak. She had come, as I had planned; but then she had left again. Burdened by the necessity of appearances I chatted to my father; to my old governess. The thought of the girl beat like a diseased and thready pulse at my throat and my wrists: she was here, but _she_ had gone. _Daughter_ : I had reading to do. Texts to consult. The girl would no doubt prove the best of them all.

By the time they let me up the stairs I'd collected myself. I was perfectly the young provincial: knocking at her door, glad of a friend. She bade me come, and looked up at me from where she sat propped in bed—and _that_ face. I recoiled. The simple provincial would feel surprise; shock; and I believe it was only a moment I let the cresting wave of envy swamp my countenance. But how, I thought. How could this girl have everything, _everything_ , and have still more—? _My child_ , my love had said, _my daughter_ ; and left the girl with a look that was not as fond, I fancied, as it might have been. And here, under our roof: a face from a childhood dream. The face that had changed everything, once upon a time.

## 1919

Even at this hour, even having moved off the balcony, I can hear the songs of the gondoliers. They are serenading late-night lovers. She finds it picturesque. Romantic. She awaits the boats at their moorings, and comes back flushed. She's never done it in the manner I would; never asked the questions I would. Which is sweeter, I've asked her, time and again: the lover or the beloved? The pursuer or the pursued? The raconteur or the secret-keeper? The debaucher or the debauched? It is beyond belief that she cannot answer. She has had long enough. But she only smiles. 

For myself, a love song makes as fitting a background as any for writing. When she opens the door, just before dawn, my letters are spread out all over the little secretaire. Medical men in Berne; Vienna; Ostend; astronomers in Berlin and Copenhagen; naturalists from London to Moscow. Without compromising my position I can give them a glimpse here; a shred there. They can give me the world as it's dawning. I stretch my shoulders; put down my pen. She lays a hand on the back of my neck. Her fingers are warm. 

'"I was one of those happy children",' she reads, over my shoulder, '"who are studiously kept in ignorance of ghost stories, or fairy tales." Still, my love? Is that what you persist in telling your good doctors? After all this time?' 

I hum, and lean into her hand. She runs her fingers through my hair. I close my eyes and think of her red mouth. I don't say: I've written it again because it's important; and because it's true. 

'Well,' she says, her chin pillowed on my shoulder. '"Lonely": that I believe. Oh, my darling. Lonely, you were.'

## 1871

This I shan't tell the doctors: I had not always been lonely. In the years between my seventh and my thirteenth birthdays, I was afforded a freedom of movement unheard-of by well-bred young ladies in large cities. In those days, I was not lonely at all.

But it's well to go further back. After my mother's death, when I was an infant of three and my father was prostrate with grief, I'm told never a day passed but that I demanded Madame Perrodon take me to the grave. It was unnatural in a child so young, Madame Perrodon used to tell me—with a shiver, still, after so many years. 'The lady passed in Spring,' she would say, 'and all throughout that Summer, and the Autumn after, and into the Winter, you would insist. I would have thought you could hardly remember her: a tiny thing as you were then. Scarcely more than a babe,' she would say, and then look at me with fond eyes, and pull me close and say into my hair: 'We tried—tried to surround you with cheerful things—' but then her voice would break and I, still tender-hearted about such displays, would put my hand on her arm to stop her speech. 

They _had_ tried to surround me with cheerfulness. And that, I now believe, was the germ of it all. I remember no specific incidents from that time; nothing concrete. Only a sense, always present, that there lurked everywhere monstrous forms, ill-perceived and worse understood. I knew that a woman I had loved had been struck, and taken by an invisible demon; and that I had been left alone. The forcible sunniness, the unceasing affability with which Madame and Mademoiselle attempted to distract and recuperate me, only served to increase my distrust. If the world, as they claimed, was an open book, animated by naught but the warmth of God's love, then from whence this lack—this almost physical sense of absence—which I still, years later, felt at the heart of myself? I had, of course, only a child's understanding of philosophy, and a child's language with which to express myself; nevertheless I remember that I tried. But I remember, too, that when I broached such subjects my sweet companions turned sad—that it made them feel, though I did not understand why, that they had failed. And so I learnt to be sweet, too: quiet, and calm; and to keep to myself my omnipresent sense of a shadow world, lurking just out of sight, behind our own. 

I believe, when I think back upon it now, that my fateful preoccupation—my obsession, as she calls it—in later years, was the result rather of this need for concealment, than of my initial bereavement. For, in the first place, the necessity of keeping secret my perceptions of darkness, and my youthful analyses of those perceptions, preserved in my mind the idea of a shadow world long after it might otherwise have faded. And, in the second place, the stubborn and wholehearted insistence on the part of my father's entire household that any books or pictures or even village gossip with which I came in contact should be only of the most cheering and amusing kind, caused me to doubt, at times, what I had seen with my own eyes and felt with my own heart. I became suspicious of myself, but also of those around me; and so, in order to secure some proof, either of their conclusions or my own, I began the practice of keeping a private mental catalogue, tallying us one against the other. In the first column, I put down everything I was told about God's unending wisdom, and His beneficent love of all his Creatures, and the kindness of Madame LeFebre toward the orphans of the village; and the explanations of learnèd men for the systems of the body, and the movements of the planets, and every natural thing. And in the other column, I put down the inexplicable nature of my mother's death; and the momentary vision of Guillaume, from the General's estate, smirking from under a horse's belly; and the western mire past which nobody would venture after dark; and the way certain books and pictures were snatched away from me. I kept such careful records inside my own head, that doing so came to seem to me second-nature; and long after my mother's face and her sweet voice were forgot, I maintained my running contest in the privacy of my own mind: the dark mystery of the world, against its open light. 

And then one night, shortly after I had learnt to read, there came into my hands a book of the kind that had so assiduously been hidden from me. _Fairy stories_ , Madame Perrodon had always clucked, and removed them from my young grasp. And so I knew that I must tell no one of this book: that it, like the double-columns in my head, must remain my secret. It was productive of anxiety, yet also thrilling, to have in my possession a history—distorted, it is true, through the lens of myth and legend, but nonetheless present—of a realm whose existence had always been denied in my hearing, and about which, indeed, I was for all intents and purposes forbidden to speak. Suddenly, the shadow-forms I had long watched for, had details: strengths; weaknesses; histories; names. _Changeling_. _Nattraven_. _Buschgroßmutter_. _Vampire_. 

In stolen moments I read and re-read. The need for secrecy only increased my hunger for moments of privacy, when I could devote myself to my subject. Soon I had the entire volume by heart; but so far from being satisfied, my craving increased. I felt I would perish were I prevented from pursuing a greater knowledge. Luckily, this mental state corresponded with my having reached an age where I was allowed a bit more latitude in my explorations, first of the grounds about the schloss, then of the surrounding forests and fields, and finally of the full span of countryside able to be compassed by an eager pair of young feet in the space between _petit-déjeuner_ and _dîner_. It will no doubt strike the reader as idiosyncratic, even neglectful; but considering what a gradual introduction I had there was, after all, little danger of my getting lost; and in the years before I came to be seen, in the eyes of villagers, as a young woman rather than a child, my father and my guardians felt there was naught to be feared. 

And so, with a chunk of bread and country cheese in my packet, I roamed the Styrian countryside in search of monsters. If I was at first shy—tongue-tied in the face of villagers and peasants whose faces were unknown to me, and uncertain how to broach a subject on which I had been so long forbidden to speak—I soon lost my inhibitions. Just as I harbored a hunger for information, I discovered in the adults I met an answering need to tell tales; and soon my second mental column neared its sister in length. I spoke with shopkeepers, and the children of the shopkeepers; the farmers' hired hands; the old women who lived companionless or in twos and threes at the outskirts of the villages and in the forest clearings. I learnt words; receipts; second-hand accounts; pictures to draw in the soil; charms to lure and to repel; places to touch on a sleeping form; even, occasionally, accounts at first hand. My catalogue became so vast, so quickly, that I could no longer trust to my memory, and took to recording my discoveries in a notebook that I kept, along with my first book of lore, under my mattress: a hiding-place from which I would carefully remove it every second Thursday, when the servants came to turn my bed.

Despite my ever-widening circle of acquaintance, however, one interlocutor eluded me—and, as is the nature of all human creatures, I became gripped by the idea of what I was denied. For years I only glimpsed her from the back: hurrying away from me, as I watched from my perch high-up in the ruins of the church in the ruins of the village of Karnstein. I was eleven, perhaps, the first time I caught sight of her. Eating my cheese and my bread in a mossy spire half-open to the sky, recording my daily chronicle in the journal, I glanced up and there she was: a dark, trim figure, upright and forthright, moving with great rapidity away from the church courtyard. The village was abandoned; no one had lived here for centuries; yet as I glanced down, over the parapet, the figure reached a hand toward the stone wall of the churchyard, and caressed it. Her touch had a quality of familiarity, of intimacy, which struck at my heart. It made my pulse race. She touched the abandoned stone in the same way I had seen my father, during one journey to Graz, caress the lintel of a house where he and his regiment had long been quartered: as if, because he had known the place, it would in some obscure way now always know him; always belong to him; an old friend. 

By the time these half-articulated thoughts had raced each other through my mind, the woman below me had recollected herself, and moved off. But in the weeks and months that followed I revisited Karnstein often, in the hope of catching a glimpse of her. If the knowledge promised in that fleeting caress held any truth, and if I could speak with her, then the things I might write in my notebook! And at home with my books and in the village with the people, I read and inquired all I could about the town of Karnstein, its erstwhile inhabitants, and what had become of them. I came to my own theories, in time, about just who a woman might be who would revisit such a place, and leave it with such a fond, familiar gesture. The Countess, I called her to myself, after the titles of the last of the line of Karnstein, whose demesne the town had been. And on every excursion to Karnstein itself I waited, and watched. Though months elapsed, sometimes, between treasured glimpses, I did see her again: three times, four, always from the back: her dark hair pulled back, her solid and upright frame moving always with a quickness and a strength of purpose unknown to any of the inhabitants of my father's schloss. She moved, I thought, as though she might travel under her own power to the furthest reaches of the world: as though she felt it, in fact, urgent to do so—yet she gave the impression, too, of being possessed of time. Of being possessed of an epoch; of an age. 

For myself, I enjoyed neither her freedom of movement, nor her lack of haste. I was restless; and impatient; and the circumference of the circle compassed by a day's walk fretted me. She was something different: something secret and free. I thought I might know her. I read my notebook at night. Lures, and repulsions. She feared nothing, I told myself, and nor should I; but I was a coward. Once only, before the night we met, did I see her face: crouched behind a box-hedge while she knelt before an unmarked plot of ground just left of centre in the churchyard. Her cheekbones were prominent; her chin square like a man's. She knelt, but her eyes were not downcast. They were dark, and burned. They burned in a direction just to the right of where I crouched, hidden; and I hoped dreadfully that she would see me there; and I thought if she did then I should die of terror. I could not make myself move. She might do anything, _anything_ ; and I could not bring myself to draw her attention with a cough, or a rustle. 

She finished her devotions, rose and left the churchyard, with, again, that familiar caress of the entrance-gate. I walked home thinking: next time. Next time. I would return and she would return and I would step out from behind the box-hedge. Next time she would see me. She would recognise me, and take me in her arms. Next time she would touch my hair. Tell me her secrets. 

When I arrived home, I ate in a kind of trance. I was feverish, Madame Perrodon said, and sent me to bed. _Next time_ , I thought, and closed my eyes. I knew I should dream of her. I could feel the bulk of my notebook, beneath the mattress. I dreamt of her indeed and when I awoke I was wet; triumphant; my suspicions proved right; my sheets stained with blood. 

Madame Perrodon smiled, and cried. I was a young woman now, she told me, and must be treasured. Protected. Chaperoned. My notebook and I were, henceforth, sweetly forbidden the forest and the meadow: prisoners in my father's schloss.

## 1919

She leans into my back. Slender fingers at my throat; in my hair. They are warm; she has warmed them—or in any case they feel warm to me; though blinking away the grit of hours at my pen I find the sky lightening in the East and again I have not eaten. The little table, salt-warped; the books' pages mist-dampened; nothing stays dry in Venice, and the hour before the morning is so often cold. Air currents off the canals. They say we are all sinking below the water-line. I never feel it until she presses herself up against me: breath on my neck. Newly-warmed fingers pulling at my shoulders; at my waist. Back, away from the window. Away from the desk. 

'Come away, dearest,' she says, when I do not move. Warm tongue to my pulse; I shiver. Touch. Human touch, I once would have said. 

I blink. My fingers are ink-stained and grip the pen. She doesn't like this latest doctor, she told me; she doesn't trust him; she doesn't like me writing to him. But she has never liked any of them: not in Rome, or Vienna. Even Hesselius, the first and safest of them all, he to whom I had written only the barest misdirected bones of the story: all through the night as I wrote, she and I fought like cats. Reconciled like monsters. She has never approved of my investigations; never understood them; never liked the ways I find to pursue them. 

'Just a moment, my love,' I say. My head hurts; my words come out colder than I intended. I can feel her pause. It grates on her, I know. I have never been possessed of patience, and of hers I have never found the limit. Even now, she is not impatient with me. Only disapproving. Only disappointed. She withdraws, silent and displeased. I want to throw some object. Hear the crash of my chair as I stand up to face her; but I don't. The pen shakes, in my hand.

She sighs, and I force myself still. I can hear her, behind me, unfastening her dress. Drawing the heavy curtains. I start to move my pen again. Scritch-scratch as she turns down the bedclothes. I am more curious than warm. She won't like that, either. 

But then, I can hardly blame her; not in truth. She has been at the mercy of my curiosity from the start.

## 1871

Difficulties arose. 

I had thought, when the Countess had consented to leave her daughter in our care, that the girl would prove a valuable entrée into the secrets of the mother. Not, of course, that I expected honesty; but surely her lies would prove informative all on their own. Whither were they tending? (What might she say?) Why had there been such urgency in the mother's errand, that she could not pause in her journey for even a night? Had they dwelt long in the vicinity of Karnstein, and if so, how often and to what distance had they traveled away from it? Must they return at given intervals? How long between journeys? Was the need to return at the heart of her mother's motivation for hurrying her outward journey? (What, indeed, did the term "mother" signify in any case, given what I suspected of their previous lives and their current existences?) My questions, always, had overflowed their banks; here at last, I thought, was a catchment of answers. 

The girl, however, resisted unremittingly my best attempts at persuasion. These attempts had perforce to be constrained; for I was, in a way, under as strict a code of secrecy as any to which Carmilla can have bound herself. I could scarcely publish abroad the fact that I, naïf that I was believed to be, had studied to lure Carmilla and the Countess to my father's house with the charm still pinned inside my dress. I could not accost, nor demand. I could only approach the subjects of my interest in an oblique, feminine way; as if the answers meant nothing more to me than Madame Perrodon's commentary on the weather—or as if, were they of greater importance, that importance stemmed solely from the attachment which to all appearances was growing between Carmilla and myself, rather than from my own native curiosity. 

In any case, Carmilla was proof against all interrogation that I attempted. This was not—as one might suppose if one had glimpsed, even for a moment, the dashing stride and prepossessing eyes of the Countess—through any obvious strength of character. That, I could have respected; that I might even have admired. On the few occasions when I directly defied the Countess's edict of secrecy, and asked Carmilla outright about her past, she became sad and tender, and told me with tears in her voice that I knew she could not say. Perversely, those were the moments I felt myself closest—though, closest to what, I could not have expressed. I knew only that her active resistance to my wishes excited a strange satisfaction in my breast; that I felt, in those moments, that I was getting somewhere at last. But in the main, Carmilla's strength lay rather in passivity; in an unceasing relaxation and languidness which my best efforts could not penetrate. Beset with glancing questions, she would sweetly speak around the point at hand. When I dared a direct question, my heart beating in my chest, she would wander away, or become languidly distracted by some inconsequential trifle, asking me questions in turn, in her soft voice, about the provenance of the draperies in the entryway, or the name of the shrub growing outside the gardener's hut. She appeared, always, serenely unaffected by such parleys; whereas I, hardly in a position to insist on a direct answer to an equally direct question, was left to stammer out my frustrated replies. 

In truth, I was viciously disappointed. Carmilla—who had ridden in the Countess's carriage, whom I imagined had lived with the Countess, dined with her, traveled the world with her—gave the impression of being, not a master diplomat or a devious conversational adversary, but only a bit soft-headed. She was, I thought to myself—lying in bed at night and staring up into the darkness, thinking of the whirling of the Countess's cloak and the snapping of the Countess's low voice—she was _banal_. As I thought it, the tears stung my eyes. 

But surely, I told myself, her softness would prove a gift in the end. I dashed away my tears. I forced myself steady; forced myself to enumerate all the chinks I might have spotted in Carmilla's armour, all the hints she might have let slip throughout the day; and I would construct plots which might use these disclosures to best advantage. I told myself Carmilla was weak. She was vapid. She professed such a strong attachment to my person; and was, as a result, so distractible and so seemingly romantic, that I could scarce believe, after a week had elapsed in her company, that upon retiring for the night to my own bed I could recount no more of her story than I had been able to that morning, or the morning previous. Surely, I thought, the next day would be the one when I broke past her defences. 

I began to look for opportunities to provoke her, so that I might watch. After many years of roaming the countryside, and another five of devouring, in secret, every written word on the subject I could find, I was in an advantageous position to create my own, and to recognise such opportunities when they came my way. The portraits, for example: ancient and smoke-blackened, they'd been objects of speculation for me for many winter months; but it wasn't until Carmilla was under our roof that I summoned the courage to suggest to my father that we have them cleaned. _Karnstein_ , one of them said, and a name I couldn't make out, and a title which might have been _Count_ but which I told myself desperately was _Countess_. Left alone in the schloss attics, where I'd hidden my books and my notebooks when my collection had grown too bulky for the space under my mattress, I'd imagined her into the obscurity of the canvas. She had seemed so near, at times; seemed almost to appear; and I had ached all over with reaching out for her. It was in that attic I'd begun to plot ways of bringing her to me in the flesh. 

The day the cleaner returned with the pictures, I spent all of supper imagining Carmilla's reactions to the unwrapping of the little portrait. If it _was_ a depiction of the Countess, would she startle? Would she like it? What might I learn of the true family relation, of the quality of feeling between the two of them? Would Carmilla want it for her own? Would she turn away in distress? And if she did, and turned to me for comfort? And if the portrait depicted not the Countess but the Count; or a different Karnstein entirely, but one she would have a high likelihood of recognising: would she be able to hide her surprise? If she were to startle, and I were to see it, then, I thought, that would be something I would _know_.

It was all I could do not to hurry the cleaner along in his careful unpacking. I wanted to miss not a moment of Carmilla's reactions as they unfolded, but as she had draped herself on the stairs across the room from the unveilings, I was forced to keep looking back and forth, my eyes leaving her face to check which portraits were being unwrapped, and to take them in for a moment myself before looking back to gauge her reaction. A sunny landscape (she yawned, hugely); an old man of the Dutch school, feeding a piece of bread to his little dog (she smiled, faintly, in my direction). It would not do to show impatience. A young mother, fair and sickly-looking, with her sickly-looking infant swaddled in her lap. Carmilla rested her head on her hands. I felt that the beat of my heart must be visible in my wrists and my throat. 

'There is a picture I have not seen yet,' said my father, and, shocked at myself for a fraction of a second, I realised just how long it had been since I had felt so warm towards him. Then the cleaner brought it out, that little square with the yellowed back and no frame; and I turned my gaze toward Carmilla. 

A flicker, perhaps. A moment, I thought—and her tongue came out to wet her top lip. 

Nothing more. 

It must not be the correct picture, I thought. Not the Countess's portrait. I turned and looked. It wasn't the Countess. It was Carmilla herself. 

For just a moment the floor seemed to pitch, as if I walked the deck of a ship. I believe I stopped breathing. My hand came up to cover the place at my breast where the charm lay hidden. 

When I came back to myself, there was my father, still in conversation with the cleaner. There was Carmilla, still half-reclining on the stairs. It was as if no one had noticed us: myself and the painting, locked together in a kind of trance. 

I approached. The little plaque I'd remembered did say, after all, _Mircalla, Countess of Karnstein_. Five minutes before, I should have been ecstatic to have learned the Countess's Christian name. Now, however, I was all confusion. The woman in the portrait _might_ have been my beloved, at a younger and less self-assured age; the heavy dark hair was the same, and the strong chin, and even, I thought, the dark fire of the eyes. But it also resembled, undeniably, Carmilla. Even clothed in the doublet and lace collar of the seventeenth century, the likeness was unmistakable. Could the woman I had been thinking of as "The Countess," have once been, as she claimed, Carmilla's blood-relation? Her _living_ mother, as well as everything else? I supposed, reeling, that there was no reason it should not be so. In which case, of whom had this portrait been made? Expecting to gain clear knowledge of my beloved at last, I had lost even the slim hold I had on her: if she was not the Countess, then what ought I to call her, whenever I thought of her?

Around me, still, the others chattered on. It seemed to me quite literally past belief that they should continue as they were; and even against my own self-interest I attempted to draw them out. 

'See,' I cried to my father, 'it is Carmilla, ready to speak!' He laughed, and looked over, all unsuspecting what I felt as I said it, heart sinking through my knees, despair clawing up through my throat. 'Even the little mole,' I said, 'on her throat.' 

Carmilla, on the stairs, had leant forward; and was, at least, looking at me with something of animation in her gaze. I was dizzy; unmoored. I felt at once that I wished be alone, and that I hovered in horror on the brink of some unbearable abandonment. 'Papa,' I heard myself say, 'Will you let me hang this picture in my room?' He laughed, far away, and Carmilla said something about moonlight, the beautiful moonlight, her voice like honey upon sugar in a heady wine. 

She took my arm, then. We walked out, together, side by side. I believe truly I might have stumbled, were she not holding me up: feeble Carmilla, whom I had felt such a disappointment. Such a keen and aching lack. We spoke of the night she had arrived. A month had passed, I realised, if the moon again was full; it was August and scent of the sweet alyssum was strong in the air. 'How romantic you are!' I tried to laugh at her, and she kissed my mouth in the moonlight. All around my face, twining around my fingers and my neck, her masses of thick black hair. 

Then she sighed. She put her face on my breast: just over the charm. If the cotton were not in the way she might kiss it: her lips to the little object I had made to bring to me the Countess Karnstein. My heart kicked. I felt I might cry. I wished, unbearably, for someone with whom I could consult; who would know the truth of the case, or know, at least, where to look, how to investigate. A teacher, or a mother. Carmilla murmured into my neck, slow treacly words of love and death, of masked galas and hidden assassins, until I could no longer stand to be so close and yet so lonely, and I pulled away.

## 1919

I lift the sheet; nudge in beside her sleeping back. She is not as warm, now. She is so still. 

By the time I put aside my letters I have had to move my chair back twice from the heavy draperies. I can feel the heat of the mid-day sun, through the double-layer of velvet. I did not want to wake her with the noise, or distract myself for the time needed to move the entire secretaire; so I ended, as I have so many times, writing on my lap, with my book as a lap-desk, my chair-back pressed up against the bed's foot-board, and my ink-pot balanced on my knee. It requires an extreme stillness, but I have that, now; and the progression has become something of a habit. When she comes in to the sight of it, and we are on good terms, she laughs. Leans back against the door, and licks her mouth. Once she wagered that without touching me she could make me spill. Blood washes; but my leg was stained black for a month. 

Now I am sleepy and sorry and want to please her. Want her to be pleased with me. Her soft black hair. I lean into it; breathe in saffron and salty copper. We could go now; as I'd used to imagine. Greece yes, Spain yes; we could go all the way to Morocco. Saffron. We could go all the way to Calcutta. Nights so warm and wet she would never feel cold to the touch. Would there be enough water in the air that we might feel slick, together? Pressed together wet. Oil; something inside, pressing inside; _What purpose can you possibly have in view?_ she says, laughing, but I am curious and she adores me and perhaps she would allow the experiment. Hair stuck to her back, her moving back, panting. Her open mouth. Hands slipping on her hips. Slick and pressing in the swamp heat, blessed Mary. In extremity my mind casts out a net and comes back, still, with _Mary, Blessed among Women. Holy Mother of God_. When she is awake, and loving me, she teases me about it. I seem not to care whether she is making fun of me because of my illustrious correspondents or my fallen nature. 

Now I pull the sheet up. Her shoulders. The swell of her buttocks against my front. Smooth, oh, soft. Oh, _oh_ —. Five hours she's slept, she'll like it now. She will and then sleep again. Press lips to her long neck and she stirs against me. Turns. Small low animal noise. As if we are, still: animals. Mouth-locked bodies. Cocooned. Kissing. Teeth out; pressing out; she feels them with her tongue and I only hear my own noise after it dies. She laughs against my mouth: I am forgiven. She is fond. Amused to wake to me needing her so. Her hand at my waist; rutting; fingers in my hair. Panting. I pant.

'Let's go to India,' I say, gasped, and she laughs, 'Now?'

'No,' I say, pressing into her, against her, hand in her long thick hair, lips at her throat.

## 1871

Carmilla was infuriating. 

She was impossible. 

Time stretched on and she gave me nothing of consequence; nothing more than scraps. I, alone in my bed or in the attic rooms in the night, felt more keenly with each passing day the possibility that had seemed to me, when that carriage had first come around the bend in the road, so remote that it need hardly be considered: that she would come to me and then pass on, and leave me untouched; unchanged. If my plan were to fail, I had always thought it would be in the initial execution—that the lure, cobbled together from pieces of old wives' magic originally intended for altogether more innocent purposes, would prove ineffectual, and that the Countess would never appear. Or, that in my self-taught and necessarily partial grasp of the theory of what I attempted, I would have missed some crucial secondary effect of the admixture of charms, and upon finishing the object would render myself subject to some unforeseen catastrophe. Never, in all my reading and planning, had I considered the eventuality that I should summon her successfully, and that she should leave with me, for weeks and weeks, her unnatural daughter; and yet that I should learn nothing; gain nothing; be neither seduced into their sisterhood nor spirited away from the prison of my life. That at the end of Carmilla's sojourn I should be left, walled up in my father's house in the manner I always had been; while Carmilla, in my stead, raced across the country in _her_ company, unconstrained by distance, or time. 

When Carmilla had first come to me I could almost laugh at the possibility of failure, it had seemed so outlandish. It went against every instinct, every piece of knowledge I believed I possessed, of natures human and otherwise: that a young girl, unspoiled and passing fair as I believed myself, should court such creatures, should invite them into her home, and should come out of the encounter unscathed. Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt, from all I had heard, had succumbed after less than a fortnight; and more and more, to my shame, it was the length of time elapsed, rather than the girl's sad end, which caused my mind to shy away from the thought of her. In the first few weeks I was cushioned by my incredulity; yet, with every passing day of peace and tranquility, the anxiety in my chest burned hotter. Was I for some reason unacceptable to them? Unacceptable in a way Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt had not been? Carmilla seemed, at times, so immoderately attached to me; she would kiss me and speak of death to me; but would never speak of the life-in-death which she and her traveling companion conducted. And this, I slowly realised, could go on. We had established a routine; a kind of life together. The occasional death in the village; the late risings in the mornings; the empty professions of love; the secrets and silences: there was no reason that they could not continue until _her_ return. I castigated myself, then: I ought to have done more at the beginning. I ought to have tried harder; ought to have formulated my plans more completely before I had ever finished the charm; long before Carmilla had ever arrived at our doorstep. It was inexcusable, I now realised: how completely I had trusted to the world to deliver the knowledge and the life I wanted. Had it done so for my mother? Had it ever done so for me? 

By the time five weeks had elapsed I could scarce sit still. _She_ could return at any time; and if she did, and I had nothing to offer her, nothing with which to bargain, no name, even, by which to call to her, then she would have no more reason to notice me than she had the night of the carriage crash. She would take Carmilla, and she would leave me alone. I could not bear to think of such an eventuality. It must not come to pass, I told myself. I would not allow it to come to pass. 

I now felt any moment with Carmilla to be wasted were I not engaged in unraveling her secrets. Yet this was made more difficult by the necessity of pretending, still, to innocence, and only idle interest in the knowledge which was, in fact, the solitary object of all my thoughts. I had, moreover, already attempted all of the obvious points of attack, to no avail. I stayed up late into the night, poring over my little attic library for details which, despite having the texts by heart, I might have missed; for ways in which I might take her by surprise. If I could only shake her calm, I thought. I had seen Madame Perrodon and Mademoiselle DeLafontaine and even my father, when distraught, make statements and exclamations that they would never permit themselves when they had their wits about them. I needed to upset her. The idea was strangely distasteful, considering everything else I had already done; but in desperation I pursued it. I need only cause her minor discomfort, I told myself. Only keep her disorientated long enough to lower her defences. _Aversion to Christian ceremony_ was a note I had written over and over—and yet, I could hardly invite Carmilla with me to Mass, or hoodwink her long enough to lure her into our church. It took me several desperate days of cogitation, and news of another death in the village, before I hit upon the idea that finally had some measurable effect.

Village funeral processions always made their way past the edge of the forest near the schloss in the early afternoons. The place was on the outer edge of the territory allowed me without a chaperon, but at mid-day, and with Carmilla for company, it would be permitted. I arranged a picnic for the both of us. She, in her indolent way, professed herself charmed. I handed Carmilla little toasts, and apple-slices, and tried, as was my habit by then, not to give away my near-obsessive observation of my guest. As the afternoon got on toward three I saw her blink, once, rather harder than usual, and put a hand briefly to the back of her neck. A minute later I, too, made out the far-off strains of a peasant hymn as it drifted down into the valley from the road on the village side. 

Carmilla corrected her gesture of discomfort almost immediately, but still my heart kicked in my chest. I confess that by now I doubt my interest could have been at all discreet; if Carmilla did not notice the sharpness of my regard, it was only due to her own considerable distress. As the procession wound down into our little hollow, still singing, her jaw tightened and the edges of her eyelids became hard; tense; yet still she smiled, sweetly, as she passed me the chocolate. I took it, and put a piece in my mouth without looking away from her face. The funeral came around the last bend, and onto the long straight stretch of road skirting the forest at whose edge we sat. Carmilla touched the back of her neck again. I suppressed an impulse to move closer to her on the blanket. I felt that I could observe her more accurately from a position closer to her; that perhaps, if I were touching her, touching her back, or her arm, then I would know, somehow, what she was hiding behind her too-sweet face. In actual fact I may have moved. I cannot say for certain. She turned her head, and she half-closed her eyes at me in that catlike way she had; and she talked on of something or another, though her left hand, the one furthest from me, and half-hidden in the folds of her dress, was contorted with tension into the shape, almost, of a claw. 

The procession droned on. They moved at a measured stagger: a step and a stop; a gathering and a step. They seemed not to progress at all. Carmilla gave a little gasp, then passed it off as a cough. 

She would brazen it out, I realised. The peasants were almost upon us. She was in pain. I had caused her pain; but she would not cry out. She was going to talk with me of inconsequential things, and even after this betrayal I would come away with nothing. I wanted to reach out and shake her. We needn't sit here, hurting her, I thought; if only she would say to move. If only she would tell me why she wanted to change place. 

In desperation I looked from Carmilla to the procession, and met the eyes of the forest ranger who walked at the head of the mourners. This living man had such deadness behind his eyes; such dumb animal grief as seemed scarcely human; and yet _she_ , who was Death, strode the land with such fiery purpose. I found myself on my feet. I found myself singing out, along with the villagers. 'For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe,' I sang, and by my side Carmilla seized; clutched at me; exclaimed without words. Her slim fingers gripped my calf. I looked down at her; her face had gone white. 

'Don't you perceive how discordant that is?' she said. Her eyes were closed; her jaw working as if she were fighting against nausea, or against some recollection inexpressibly painful to her. I wished I could stop her thinking of it. I wished I could draw it out through her skull, to take her burden on myself, with just my fingertips burrowed into her silky black hair. 

But I could not. I could only continue singing. An expectorant, I told myself; a purging medicine, for us both. 'The Prince of Darkness grim,' I sang, 'we tremble not for him.' But it was not true: for I trembled; and Carmilla's hand on my calf was shaking. 

'You pierce my ears!' she cried, at last, and sprang to her feet, and I could not stand to continue; I turned to look at her and her eyes blazed out at me. Anger. I had never before seen her angry. She was so like _her_ this way; my mouth went dry. In an instant a thousand strange fancies chased themselves through my head: that we two had lived before; that I was here, in the modern day, and yet I was also present ages earlier, on the same ground centuries past, and this was _her_ face as a young woman and this time I was permitted to know her. I was permitted to know everything about her. 

'I hope there is no plague,' I said, 'or fever coming.' I hardly knew what I was saying. I only knew I must keep pushing; must back her up and up until I had her in a corner and she pulled aside the curtain to let me see. If she suspected that I suspected, there was no time. If she knew that I knew about her. Her tiny fingers bit into my wrist. 'The swineherd's young wife,' I told her, breathless, 'thought something seized her by the throat as she lay in her bed.' Carmilla pulled me back toward the trees; I followed. 'Papa says such horrible fancies do accompany some forms of—fever.'

Carmilla backed up against a flat boulder; she sat down, hard, and as she had been pulling me along I stumbled against her: my free hand on her shoulder, my legs between her knees. She looked up at me with a hard, blazing fury. I felt _close_ ; wanted to be closer. 'She was quite well the day before,' I managed, and Carmilla opened her mouth as if on a gasp. I told her, 'She sank afterwards. Died before a week.'

She gave a little moan. She was struggling; I _had_ her, and if I had Carmilla then I had something of _her_ , as well. It was as if a giant bird took wing inside my chest; beating a great wind at my back. 

Her voice when she spoke was ragged. 'Sit down here,' she said. 'Beside me.' 

I sat next to her, on the flat rock. We were touching all down our sides, shoulders to thighs, but she said 'Sit close,' and I pressed in further. She was humming with a kind of wild energy. Had it been practicable to do so I would have cut her open to let it loose. I would have watched it work, breathless, heedless of the consequences. 'Hold my hand,' Carmilla gasped, and I did, and 'harder,' she said, so I squeezed, and 'harder!' she said, through clenched teeth, and then pressed her lips together so tightly they turned white. 

Were it possible to look so intently at something that one changed one's position in space, then I would have dwelt then within Carmilla; within her very frame. In that moment my looking took on such a greedy yearning force that I almost could not bear to hold it; I pressed her hand and pressed toward her and would have pressed _inside_ her; would have given any precious thing to feel in my own skin the flush that darkened her face into lividity; to feel what happened inside her fists when she clenched them; inside her chest when it rose and fell; inside her mouth when she pressed it so fiercely closed. I was frantic to know. She trembled head to foot, and I felt it in my skin and trembled too. She frowned, and looked down at her knees, but in the shape of her face in half-profile, despite her clenched mouth, I could see a change, under her skin—her teeth, changing. If I put my fingers up, I would feel them shift. Bulge. I dug the fingers of my free hand into her thigh. She cried out, long and low. My tongue _ached_. 

Afterwards I could not speak. Once the fit had passed off Carmilla became animated, and chatty. It was the way I had always, until now, liked her best. With a rising sense of panic I knew that I ought to press my advantage; that I might never get another opportunity so fortuitous. _Your mother's name_ , I thought, frantically. _Your mother's home. Your travels with your mother_. The words would not come; I could not make them come. _Are you troubled by your mother?_ I thought, in horror at my own concern, and: _is she unkind to you?_. Yet I did not say these things, either. I felt they were burning me from within. I felt I was choking on them; as if I myself were the wife of the young swineherd, strangled in her bed by the girl-monster at my side. I could still feel the echo of Carmilla's trembling, all down my left side. I flexed my hand, bruised from her tiny fingers. I knew I must; I knew I _must_. All through that walk home, I could not bring myself to speak.

## 1919

I did things; do still. Terrible things. 

But then: they fanned the flames of my curiosity, did they not? Carmilla, and the Countess, the Countess and Carmilla: they, at least as much as I, are to blame. 

If I must answer for what I have done then they must answer for when they came to me. I who had been so sheltered, so cosseted, but so very, very curious: they must be held to account for when they came to my baby nursery, and lay in my bed. For when they cradled my head and kissed my neck and _bit_ and then for when they slid out of my grasp, like silk, like black smoke as I cried for them: stay with me, take me, don't hide from me, don't leave. For when they placed between my coverlet and my mattress, still warm from the weight of them, their forbidden text, their fairy story, the means of my escape: my first map to our hidden world of monsters.

## 1871

As if a pair of needles, plunging—

Through the window the wind, gusting, cold air on my skin; outside snow on the ground and steam from the mouths of the peasants, steam from the flanks of the horses, as in my room on the hearthrug a black shape, a beast-shape, black smoke from under the bed-frame; under the door; swirling together it has legs. Me in my white nightdress with my notebook and the thing prowls. It jumps. Its eyes brown human eyes, I am awe-struck, awful, I can't look away and I am scribbling scribbling, writing so fast my hand cramps as smiling it draws its lips back from its teeth and plunges—

—into my breast—

I remember waking. Breathing hard, frantic. I could still feel the place where the double-needles had pierced my skin; my hand, out of instinct, flew to the wound, though my skin, now, was smooth. Yet still, my chest near-spasmed under my palm. 

It was night. The night of early morning; the moon had traveled more than half its arc in the night sky. It was only thanks to its light I could see the hand in front of my face; for the candle I kept at my bedside was burnt down to a stub. My eyes darted to bureau—to the window—to the hearth rug—to the figure. The figure which stood stock-still by the right-hand bedpost. Her shoulders back. Her long dark hair around her face. 

I could not blink. Could not draw breath. How tall was she? How old did she appear? What had she done to me? Was it _her_ come at last or was only—?

'Carmilla?' I whispered, but the figure did not shift. Did not breathe. I too was frozen though I wished to go to her. Shift forward in the bed; offer my breast again. Press my lips—

She was at the window. Had I blinked? Panic: was she going? I swallowed; she was at the door. Her back faced to me; were her shoulders squared? Were her hands the hands of a young girl, or a woman? She flickered in the light, but she did not move. She was by my side; I could reach out. I could reach out and touch her I could touch her. My tongue, huge in my mouth; she was by the door—and then she was gone. 

'No,' I whispered, in a flood of horror, running to the door, ' _no_ —'

The corridor was empty. My breast ached.

I wept.

As the dawn broke on my sleepless morning I thought I should never forgive Carmilla, were she playing some cruel joke upon me. I thought I should never forgive _her_ , were she taunting me to no purpose. I thought I should follow them both to the ends of Heaven and Earth, should they give me the smallest sign of permission. Like any girl of eighteen, bitterly I cried.

That morning she was, of course, nowhere to be seen. I felt empty; at a loss; I knew not whether the ghostly figure had been Carmilla or _her_ or some other spirit entirely; but whoever it had been, I wanted her near. All the raw longing had bubbled to the surface of me. My skin felt tender where the teeth had pierced it, in the winter of my dream. 

I came down the stairs. Madame Perrodon and Mademoiselle DeLafontaine sat at the table talking. It was impossible, _unthinkable_ , that I should seat myself at their sides and partake of eggs and sausage-meats. I had been patient, so patient for so long and I had nothing to show for it, to which I could hold. I wanted to scream. I stood in the corridor by the stairs and felt I might burst forth in some new form. I thought to turn around and retreat to my room; plead some mild indisposition and fall back upon my books. 

And then, Mademoiselle's voice: 'The long lime walk is haunted!' 

Haunted. My mouth turned dry and I held myself up. I made myself walk; made myself sit, though it seemed beyond my means. The two good women were laughing together. Madame got up to fetch me a hot chocolate as they told of the female figure—tall, dark-haired, with a purposeful with a, with a purposeful stride—walking down the lime tree avenue under Carmilla's window. 

I looked down at the cup by my fingers. Steam rose from chocolate. The idea of putting it to my lips was so removed from myself as to be utterly alien. They had seen her— _her_ : they had seen her walking in the lime tree avenue. A 'purposeful stride': that could never be our languid Carmilla. It could only be her—and she had stood, not six hours since, in my bedchamber. She had come to _me_ ; shown herself to _me_. I could have reached out and touched her and instead—and what if I had missed my chance? My only chance? How was it I had failed to bound up, to touch her flesh, to prostrate myself at her feet? Imagine if she had been granting me my opportunity, and I had let it slip by? Imagine if she told Carmilla—if she took Carmilla—if she made herself known to Carmilla and collected her and took her away in her carriage and they drove off, laughing together, and I never saw either of them again!

'You must not say a word about it,' I told the good ladies. I rose, as in a dream, my chocolate untouched. Truly, I felt I might be dreaming; I wished to be dreaming. I wished that this bright kitchen were a dream; and that from it I should wake to the reality of my dark bedchamber, at the foot of my bed a tall, pale figure, turning to me with her shoulders thrown back and a command in her eyes. Madame Perrodon and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine looked up at me, questioningly, and I made my voice once again soft. 

'You must not mention anything to Carmilla,' I told them, 'because she can see down that walk from her window; and she is, if possible, a greater coward than I.'

Some time later, in a haze of regret and self-recrimination, I regained my chamber. I _was_ a coward. I _had_ been a coward, again and again. But no more, I vowed. I cast from me the hunchback's false charm, the one in which Carmilla pretended to keep such faith; and pinned to my pillow instead the lure which I had made. I knelt by my own bedside; thought of that night in the moonlight, and pressed my own lips to the potion-soaked herbs. Come back, I thought, burning with inquisitive, acquisitive shame. Only come back; only come back; only come—

## 1919

She returns early, tonight; and brings with her an old German, left over no doubt from the war: a military man. 

I put down my pen; lean back in my chair. Of course: she has been reading my letters again. Well, it isn't as though I keep them secret. She knows the place in the story I've got to; she always does. I look at her over the top of my spectacles. She widens her eyes at me: a parody of innocence. 

'Herr General.' I speak with Spielsdorf's old Styrian inflection; she will know she's been understood. The man bows to me, too deeply. He is already off-balance. She catches the back of his jacket so that he does not fall. She does it neatly; gracefully. I know without looking at her little smile that she is pleased with herself and the quickness of her motion and the way her body serves her. If I touched her skin it would burn hot. Caught by her strong arm, the General smiles blankly over my left shoulder. He appears content. Since she drank from him he's felt numbed; comfortable; and given his scent I would wager it's been a year since he passed an evening without pain.

'Of late you've been thinking of the schloss, my love,' she says. 'Homesick. Always scribbling away.' 

'So you thought…' 

'I thought, a little familiar blood—'

I cast my eyes up; her smile flashes. Her red mouth. Dimples, still. When she is in this temper they strike me as grotesque. Unnatural. An unbearable attraction. I stand, and approach; and she holds him up for me as I feed. She is laughing. Pleased. When she is like this she takes as written that any plan of hers will go off perfectly. That everyone will be delighted with her, so that she may remain delighted with them. Just now I've been good, so she kisses his blood out of my mouth. She spirits away the remains, even, while I rest; though later, I discover that my last letter found its way out along with the body.

Afterward she comes back smiling. She pets me; gloats over me. Her pleasure has, still, that brutal edge. 

'I'm only sorry,' she says, 'that he hadn't a young ward. I'd have brought them both back, my beautiful girl, but saved her for you.'

She wants me to be shocked, so that she can soothe me quiet. It is an old game of ours. A kind of cleansing ritual. For a few years in the '90's in the heat of Constantinople we played it near every night. She used to tease me until I wept and begged forgiveness for what I'd done—as if she, of anyone on earth, were qualified to give it. It helped me, then. But this is the new century: glass, metal, and speed. We haven't time to linger over our sordid histories. Had Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt lived, she would have been more decrepit now than that diseased general we just put out of his misery.

'I don't take young girls by preference,' I say, now, reclined on the couch, my head on her lap. 'Only by accident, or necessity.'

'Don't you,' she says. Wide smile. Teeth. I can hear it; no need to look. And then she says, in German: 'I'm sure that was a comfort to the General. Which was _she_ , then?'

'Accident,' I tell her, though she knows it all by heart. 'That was the first lure. Secreted in his things, in a moment of weakness.' I crack open an eye. 'It was meant for you,' I tell her, 'but my courage failed me.'

'But your spirit of enquiry never did.'

'Not yet,' I say, and turn my head to kiss her thigh. 'It hasn't. No.'

## 1871

I thought I should never sleep that night. My eyes were dry but still sand-hot and swollen; and with every breath I nearly choked on the fumes from the lure. I thought I would gag on it if I needed to. Would swallow it if I needed to. I thought I might never sleep again. Come back to me, I thought; and burned, and burned. 

And yet I must have slept; for I awoke to moonlight, and the sight of Carmilla. She was stood at the window, faced away from me, clad in white with her long black hair down her back; and she seemed to look out on the forest below. 

My heart at once raced, and sank down in my chest. Why had she come? And how had I ever mistaken _her_ for Carmilla? Looking now at Carmilla's slight, girlish form, and calling to my mind the tall, unbending and unmoving figure of the night before, I thought it once again incredible that I should have hesitated; that I should have doubted. The remnant of the nightmare, perhaps—if, indeed, a nightmare it had been. But now, here: if Carmilla had made her way to my room, why did she not wake me? I was seized by the conviction that she was going to leave me; that _she_ had summoned her, and Carmilla was here, now, to bid me farewell. That perhaps she planned to vanish in the night, without so much as telling me before she went. My hands, without my consent, were reaching out in front of me in the bed, clutching handfuls of the coverlet.

'Carmilla,' I said.

She did not turn. She seemed not even to breathe. My voice had sounded loud in the darkness, and in its aftermath the silence closed around me.

I pushed the coverlet aside. The air was bitingly cold; the stone floors hurt my feet. I shivered as I padded across to her; yet I felt, too, uncomfortably hot. Still, she did not turn to me; but nor did she turn away, and when I drew even with her at the window, I could see her face. 

She was so beautiful. She had been always, of course. Everyone remarked upon it. Yet hers was a beauty so sweet and passive, that often it had failed to penetrate the boundary between what I knew to be true, and those truths whose self-evidence I felt for myself. Here, though, in the moonlight, her face appeared to me so mournful; and her slim shoulders set with such grieved resignation, that, wondering, I felt the pull of it. It was as if a tendon within her hooked to the place in me from whence sprang tears. Without words her beauty and her sadness and solitude pulled me closer, until my hand rested on the white lace at her upper arm. 

She turned to me at last, then; and ran a gentle hand through my hair. The chill breeze came through the window, carrying the first promises of autumn. Her hand was so cold. 

'What is wrong?' I whispered. She closed her eyes, and bent her head, and kissed me. Chill lips to my lips. Had I been myself, in that moment, my heart should have been galloping. I should have drawn back; pestered her with questions. Now I was caught in a kind of trance. I tipped my head back; opened to her. I wanted to warm her. I wanted her to stay. 

For a long few moments she kissed me. Now there was none of the fire and fury she had shown in the forest, the day of the funeral procession. Tonight she seemed slowed with cold and sorrow beyond even her customary languidness. She scarcely moved; the only points of contact between our two bodies, held otherwise carefully apart, were my hand on her arm, and her lips on my lips, and her hand in my hair. My eyes had closed of their own accord; and in the stillness and the darkness and the breeze from the window I stood, enveloped by her stillness. Under my hand her skin seemed to grow yet colder. I had the strange fancy that her hand, at the back of my head, had grown hard; as if a tree-limb, bare of leaves, scraped at the back of my neck. I shivered, and it was as if the motion passed from my body into hers. I felt a kind of tremor pass like a wave all through her. Her hand tightened in my hair as her shoulder snapped back, away from my hand—and I opened my eyes and gasped. 

It was _she_. She whom I had been kissing; her cold lips which had parted mine. She stood half a head taller than Carmilla; and her shoulders inches broader—yet somehow, though I had never ceased touching her, I had not noticed the change. Were it not for her hand in my hair, near holding me up now, I should have stumbled backward. The floor seemed to reel. She smiled down at me, holding me steady, and her arms were so strong. Had I been dreaming, then, when I had seemed to see Carmilla, standing sad and solitary in the moonlight? And when I had studied her face, so carefully, had I been hoodwinked? Dreaming? Was I dreaming now? 

She laughed at me; shook me by the shoulders. 

'You are perfectly right in your mind,' she said, in her low deep voice, and that voice: the voice which in my bed I had conjured to myself every night since first I had heard it; of which I had dreamed; which I had imagined saying—and a sound escaped my lips like the noise of an animal, which realises it has been struck a fatal blow. 

She took my chin between her thumb and forefinger, and even her hands could never be mistaken for Carmilla's hands: large, long and large-boned. They could hold anything, I thought; they could hold me; and she lifted up my face to look full on her eyes which were dark, _burning_ , spilling over with that insuppressible energy I had observed in the churchyard, and beside the remains of her carriage. 

'You're here,' I said, and she smiled.

'I am,' she said, and kissed me again, and now I did reach out. Now I did press against her: bosom to bosom. My mouth opened under hers and I clutched at her sides; at her strong shoulders; the swell of her breast. She was uncorseted; her wide hips; her soft waist. 

'Take me with you,' I said. 'Don't leave me, please, take me with you.' She laid a long finger on my lips. I quieted, in the circle of her other arm. I still felt that if she let me go, I might fall. 

'I have such plans for you,' she told me. I was hot, now; burning through; her fingers cool on my skin were a relief. I wanted more of them. Wanted them everywhere. She touched my nape and I gasped; she ran her hand under my shift, down my back, where I could feel the perspiration dripping down the hollow of my spine; and I moaned. 

'I need you,' she whispered. Mouth to my ear, face pillowed in my hair; I clutched at her shoulders and nodded. Anything. I expect I said it aloud: anything; anything she asked. She pushed me back toward the bed and I clung to her. 

Now I was short of breath. Now I wanted her to lay me down. Her cool hands: if she might lift me back behind my draperies; lay me out and peel off my shift. The cool air on my skin; her chill mouth; I made another noise and 'Shhh,' she whispered, into my hair. I think she was carrying me. I remember her setting me down, my feet back on the chilly floor, me making a little protesting whine because I had tried to tip back onto the bed but she was making me stand. Turning me. Her stalwart arms about my shoulders; her lips pressing against my temple. 

I breathed and trembled, and my eyes cleared. She could not have lain me down, I saw now: my blankets and my coverlet swelled already with another form. Rosy-white skin; dark hair; her chest rising and falling. It was Carmilla: sound asleep, in my bed. I clutched at the arms encircling me: they held me, still. My head swam. Carmilla was before me, and _she_ was behind: her arms around me, undeniable; though without turning my head I could no longer see her face. 

'I must take care of her, you see,' came the low voice, in my ear. I relaxed against her front. 'You can see that I must.'

Carmilla made a noise in her sleep, something like distress. Fretful, with her smooth brow furrowing and her little mouth open, she turned on her side. My hand was resting on the coverlet; from behind me, _she_ lifted it up. She used my fingers to reach out and caress Carmilla's cheek. 

'She needs feeding,' the low voice told me. 'And she is so particular. I can never leave her for long.'

The girl shifted. She gave a little moan in her sleep. Within her open mouth I could see, now, the cause of the bulging I had observed the afternoon of the funeral: her incisors lengthened, and thickened. Yet she did not wake. 

'She smells you,' came the voice, behind me. 'She is so very attached to you, you know.'

I did not know what to do. I could not move from out the circle of arms that held me. My heart beat in my chest and I looked down at my hand, the backs of my knuckles caressing Carmilla's cheek as she softly moaned, and drew her lips back from her teeth as if to bite. The front line of her mouth, distended: I could not look away. She gave a whimpering noise, and opened wider. My breath caught in my chest. Below my ribcage, the gentle pressure of hands increased. 

'Should I—' I said, and could not continue. 

'What would you do, were you alone?' Rumbling; hypnotic in my ear. 'What do you want to do?'

Carmilla panted, now, in her sleep. Her eyelids twitched. I stood by her side and thought, all at once, of how she had refused me: over and over again, how she had put off my inquiries, no matter how I had pleaded; no matter how she had claimed to love me. Like this, I could have her. I could know her. She would not refuse me now. 

'We must take care of her,' I said, 'mustn't we.' The voice behind me hummed its low approval as I crawled forward, onto the bed. 

Carmilla was waking, now. I knew not what to do; I was next to her; could smell her coppery scent; could see her long white teeth in her open distorted mouth but I knew not how to proceed. I looked back up at the creature Carmilla had called _Mama_ and whom I had used to call, in my mind, The Countess; she was smiling down at us, one long hand at her breast and the other at her throat. 

'Laura,' Carmilla murmured, behind me, still slow with sleep. When I turned to her, her face too was soft-edged, and her eyes slipped half-shut though her breath came so fast she nearly panted. She was affected. She seemed more affected, now, than even on that moonlit night when she had told me she had been in love with no one, and never should, unless it be with me. Here in my bed there was a disbelieving restraint about her, as if she held herself back from a precipice; and nothing but that restraint locked her into slowness, and languidness. Without it—she was so achingly beautiful. 

I raised up my hand: fingers to Carmilla's cheek, thumb catching on her open bottom lip. Her eyes slipped closed; she gave a slow, a helpless little moan, as if something broke inside her; and—

—my wrist; quicker than blinking: the iron grip of her tiny hand and her mouth bent down to it _piercing_ —

I believe I gasped at the shock of it. Shock, more than pain, though the high-pitched searing of the punctures shot up my arm to my elbow, then to my shoulder. Something had changed in me; I was different, now, to when I had woken screaming from the nightmare of the two needles to my breast. Carmilla's face was angled only slightly down and I could see her expression, as she drank; could hear her little moans and see the way, with her whole small body under her nightclothes, she kept shifting, as if desperate to get closer. And the pull of the blood as she drank: a twinned pressure that lay atop the pain, twined 'round it, twisted 'round the hard beating of my heart, so that together they annealed into something fiery and sweet and melting. 

I was shifting now, as much as she. I felt feverish; ill-fitted to my skin; the high neck of my night-dress choked me. Carmilla drew back from my wrist and licked at the wounds with her little red mouth, murmuring words: 'You never let me; I wake up, always; you never—,' pressing her tongue hard to my skin like she might do anything; and 'Oh,' I said, as the punctures closed up, ' _oh_ ,' staring down at her; but then felt cold hands at my back. Lifting my hair off my neck. Nuzzling close. 

'She is lovely,' the low voice said. She buried her face in my hair. 

I could not tell whether she was speaking to me, or to Carmilla; whether the lovely one she meant was Carmilla, or myself; and somehow, that uncertainty set me ablaze. I could not keep quiet. My eyes slid shut and I moaned, and pressed myself back. I moulded my back against her breast. I was a glutton for greater pressure; for more skin. The fronts of my legs and chest and shoulders felt bereft of touch: as if I stood before a fire on a day so frigid that the side of me faced away from the flame remained always cold. Carmilla took my hand in her little fingers, and licked again at the place on my wrist where her wounds had been. _Open them again_ , I thought. Almost a prayer. _Dear God you must open them again_. Aloud I whimpered. Carmilla only laughed, quick and delighted, and licked at my arm, and at the hollow of my elbow. When my eyes came open to watch her, hers were fixed on me, and burning with a power of purpose I had never before seen in her. Overwhelmed I cried out, and Carmilla was at once with unnatural speed pressed against me, her bosom to mine; the soft curves of her; her mouth to my mouth. She was so _warm_ ; and I thought: she could be warmer. I could make her warmer. I was burning up; I had too much. She must take some, I thought; and I moaned and pressed myself against her breast, hands scrabbling at her waist under her shift. Behind me a colder hand closed hard in my hair. It sounded only the faintest echo of the piercing of teeth; yet still I cried out.

'So lovely,' the low voice came again, at my ear, slow now and syrupy. Warm lips at my lips; cold hands on my waist, hands at my hips pulling me closer and a thigh between mine while I: beating; blazing; I would have been pleading but my mouth was taken; head held back by my hair. 

'Shall you have a taste, then,' came Carmilla's sweet voice.

'Yes,' I said, 'Please, oh—'

'She wants you to,' Carmilla said, again, sounding almost commanding; and my noises… like barnyard noises. A beast in distress. She might have laughed but she didn't (my head pulled back); I might have blushed but I didn't (her hands on my hips); and 'Only look at her,' said Carmilla, from behind me, further away, having drawn back to—from _behind_ —

My eyes flew open and—gasping—

There she was: before me. Knelt in front of me. Like a supplicant, like any peasant, but it was _her_ , unmistakably; and when I turned my head to look behind me there was sweet Carmilla. Only: looking at her, now, Carmilla somehow seemed to me less sweet; less small; taller though she still knelt; alight with a magnetic and a burning energy. She looked as though she might run miles; or skim like a bird over the surface of the earth; fly out over the fields and the cities, proof against any winter storm. She appeared a goddess; and _she_ , kneeling before me, like a child. My head spun. I pressed myself back, into Carmilla's hands. Her pointed chin she rested on my shoulder. 

'She's warm,' said Carmilla. 'And in need. You will take.'

Before me her head was bent down. Her chest rose and fell. Dark hair, like Carmilla's. Heavy like Carmilla's. If I closed my eyes with my hand in this hair I might open them again to find that instead of her I touched Carmilla. That Carmilla knelt before me while _her_ low voice commanded Carmilla to drink. I let my fingers close in dark tresses as hers had in mine. She gave a grunt; a little sigh; and then tipped forward, slow, like honey in the winter. 

'That's it,' Carmilla told her; and then whispered in my ear: 'That's it.'

She nosed at me. Rubbed her face on my stomach; on my thighs. Between my thighs. I tipped her head back by the hair and watched it happen to her: her teeth distending the line of her mouth. 'For you,' Carmilla whispered, and then turned my head and kissed me, hard, mouth open so that I might feel hers, needle-sharp in her mouth. With my tongue I tested the tip of one, and she moaned low, but she did not press. Did not nick, like I'd—I pressed _her_ face between my legs, over my shift. Boiling hot. Over-full.

My hand to the back of her head: I pressed and her hands found my calves. Her fingers dug in and I gasped. _More_ , I thought: _more_ , and shifted my hips against her mouth; and she turned her head to the side. I sobbed; Carmilla growled. 

'Take,' Carmilla said. She grabbed at the hem of my shift and tore it up, over my head, rough. Cold I felt, for an unbearable instant, and then starving gratitude to be pressed again between Carmilla's breast and _her_ cool cheek. Carmilla was hot now; radiating warmth, and her arms around me gripped me with such force, and her little fingers dug with such strength into my hip and my bosom, that I felt she might lift me up off the bed. As if I were her little pet, as if I were—as if she might lift me up and fly away, her gripping arms and her strong kicking legs, her wings carrying us to wherever on Earth she chose and I, tucked next to her, tucked, tucked _into_ her, carried along with her, beside her, feeding into her some bright— _purpose_ —

'You delight in provoking me,' Carmilla hissed, over my shoulder; but I could scarcely hear. 

I was undone. I knew not what I did. I had, still, my hands in _her_ hair; and before me her sharp cheekbone pressed up against the bone between my legs. I was rubbing myself—pressing myself. Short, ungraceful movements; I cared not how I seemed to them, and they might have taunted me. Tormented me. Bid me beg in my strange unbeautiful animal voice. I had seen the barn cats that slunk about with their hips in the air as if they hurt them, and I was with them. Crying demanding. Demanding. Caring for nothing except _having_ too much. Over-burdened, with no one to take it from me. 

A rumble from behind me and I wailed. That resonance: could it be Carmilla's sweet voice? It came again and before me _she_ jerked back, as if slapped. She looked up at me; at us; and then. Her face pressed at last, lips to crook of leg and hip, the long bridge of her aquiline nose tilted to soak, Lord _press_ there, _press_ Holy Mary Mother of God as she opened her mouth I was screaming already and _two_ sets of sharp—groin and neck pulling—throbbing crying—pulling it out of me away from me and in relief I was sobbing as they took enough from me that I could fit back in my skin. So that I might sleep.

## 1919

We walk out together in the early evening, when faint pinks and purples still linger in the west, where the Rio Marin stretches out. It is so early the cafes have not yet opened for supper. People bustle along the water: women, mostly, now that the navy has been dispersed. Children, and old men. There is nothing more familiar than her arm around my waist. 

Groggy with the last vestiges of sleep, we don't much speak. Idly she breaks a rose off at its stem. She turns to tuck it behind my ear, and regards her handiwork. She says nothing, but I know she is pleased. Pale pink: she can never resist it against the gold of my hair. She tucks her arm around me again. Loose; yet still: possessive.

She will be hungry, but she doesn't say. Doesn't move away from me. I'm sated, still, from waking her in the depth of the afternoon. We wander. 

We cross a canal; turn along another. Cross water, again. On our left, the massive red brick of the Frari. I think I smile a little; wait for the gentle pressure on my left side, but instead it comes on my right. I don't argue. Why would I? There will be no mass in progress, at this hour; and I've no aversion to the trappings of faith. 

The streets outside are still warm from the day's sun, but in the nave of the basilica cool marble stretches out under us; and over us. Red squares and white. Centuries of the faithful. An old woman kneels before the Assunta. Another lights a candle at the altar of St. Catherine. The flames flicker on all the vivid blues and greens of the upraised arms of the Titians. Our footfalls resound. 

Even after so many years, I am often unsure whether she has guided our steps with purpose. We enter the transept on the side by the sacristy, so that one John the Baptist passes us on the right while another looks down on us from directly ahead. An omnipresent fellow. In the corner we pause by an inlaid slab inscribed: Claudio Monteverdi. A great man amongst great men. The red-and-white stonework turns sideways, here. 

'Are you fond of his work?' I ask her. She has never said.

'We never come together,' she says, 'to places like this.'

Ah, I think. This is about the letters, then. She will not let it be. She looks down at the tomb: the bones of the dead decaying restfully under the dirt and the stone and the metal. All the blood long since drained away. 

'You dislike remembering it,' I tell her. Since Constantinople, I don't say; but: 'I don't care to force you. There are such a wealth of other places for us to explore.'

'Did you watch,' she says, 'when they burst it open?' 

I turn my head from her; her fingers close around my wrist. With the other hand she drags up my chin, so that I must look. There are no tears in her eyes, but still they appear water-logged. Sodden, with canal damp. 

'What were you feeling, my little love?' I shake my head. Some of the old coldness sounds, in her voice. 'You feel it again for your doctors; feel it again for me. Let me kiss it off your lips. How was it for you? Having sent them on their way, having set the machine in motion? Riding along in that carriage, not knowing, when they burst open that crypt, whether they would find me, or—"

## 1871

I had thought… I do not know what I had thought. 

I had thought, perhaps, when I saw and felt _her_ in my arms, that at last I was to Become. That my questions should be answered; that my curiosity should be satisfied. That the thirst within me, the conviction which since my infancy all around me had so steadfastly denied, should at last be not only confirmed but proclaimed; celebrated; indulged without constraint. That I should be allowed at last to give myself to it, and that it should reward me. 

And then—thrilling to Carmilla's new voice, and the new power in her looks, I perhaps had thought—

But I was mistaken. I awoke, late in the morning, and I was alone. I leapt out of bed; I rushed through my toilette; I thought of Carmilla—the new Carmilla—and thought, _I have changed her_ ; and _I shall see her again_ ; and _she is here, under this very roof_ —and then thought, as well, _and she will know where_ she _has gone: the other woman_. I did not doubt, rushing down the stairs that morning, that Carmilla would be exactly as eager to see me again as I was to see her; that she would make an exception, today, to her usual practice of late rising. And yet downstairs in the sitting room and at the luncheon table I waited with ill-disguised impatience as the clock chimed eleven, and twelve, and then the usual hours of Carmilla's appearance. When she did appear, it was a full two hours later than her general practice; and although she did bestow on me smiles, and caresses, they were of the same languid kind as of old. She was sweetness, and softness, and vapidity. In vain I sought in her bearing or countenance any of the power or energy of the night before. When I persuaded her out for a walk in the evening, and made bold to ask after her Mama, she only sighed. Her mouth tightened, and she gave a little shake of her head. We trailed along the path: our hands entwined, yet our faces turned away from one another.

I began to think, then, that I must have dreamt the night before. It had been, indeed, so like a dream or a vision; and so disconnected from the usual laws of logic and of nature, that I could almost persuade myself of the truth of this supposition. Surely two beings could not exchange places with one another without physical motion, as Carmilla and the other woman had done; surely they could not wound a body as they had wounded mine, and leave no marks. The events which I had supposed I perceived, had been born of my own thwarted desire; and I was in truth no closer to escaping the schloss, or to being inducted into the secrets of the conclave to which Carmilla belonged, or even to learning the true name of the creature I had once called The Countess, than I had been a day earlier, or a week, or a month. 

Only: they came again. Two nights later they came; and again the next night; and three nights hence. _She_ would show herself, and command me give myself to Carmilla; and Carmilla would grow strong and commanding in her turn; and they would tease me and each other until I thought I must die of nearness to them, and of proximity to all the secrets of their close-kept lives. Those nights were the most vivid I had ever passed, and the days the most crushing; for after every tryst my nameless beauty would vanish; and Carmilla, when next we met, would seem to have lost all of her passion, all of the energy and brightness which kindled in her after she had fed from me. When I questioned her at such times, her face would assume a pained tightness, and she would shake her head once, eyes wide, lips pressed tight together. I came to wonder, with a nameless, sinking dread, whether she would not speak, or whether she _could_ not.

And I wondered too, now more than ever, how much longer our arrangement could go on.

My curiosity and my sharp eyes, I told myself, had brought them here; had brought both of them to my side. My curiosity and my sharp eyes must find the way on from here. With a wild desperation, then, I vowed I should stay awake. I should refuse to surrender to the blissful lassitude which overcame me after our trysts. I should observe how the disjunction came about, between the Carmilla of night and the one of day. It was my carelessness, I thought, which was allowing her to slip back into her weakened state. I would stay awake, and feed her, and when she showed signs of flagging I would bid her drink. _More_ , I imagined myself telling her, while I tossed feverish alone in my bed. _Take more, drink more, command me give you more and be strong enough to take us both—_

In retrospect it was an impracticable plan; but I was young and beside myself. They came as I'd foreseen; and I gave of myself as I'd planned as they pulled me to the precipice and over; and when the wave of exhaustion crashed over me and I fought it with all my might. I struggled, as if drowning, and in cresting the surface caught glimpses: Carmilla and the other woman, eyes locked across my bed. Carmilla, holding the other woman's hand, mouth lowered to the other woman's wrist; a wavering of light; and then the other woman's mouth on Carmilla's wrist. The other woman kneeling with her head thrown back, Carmilla standing over her near glowing, with a knife in her hand. And then Carmilla, curling warm against my back, and the other woman tucking her in under the coverlet of my bed. And then: darkness, where the other woman had stood; and I jolted out of my lassitude to reach out.

'Don't!' I said. 

Carmilla stirred beside me. An inquiring little noise. But I knew not what I'd meant, myself. 

'Do not—do not go to sleep,' I told her. My heart tried to pound; managed only to squelch. 'I don't want to sleep.'

I should have slept anyway, if she so commanded me. I should have wrapped myself around her hard enough to stop her metamorphoses: stop her changing into the other woman; stop her changing back into herself. But she stretched, and yawned. She turned over, onto her back. I was truly awake, now. My heart became leaden, and logged with liquid too cold and thin. 

'Drink more,' I said: to say so had been my plan. And where was the knife? I snatched it from the bedside table. Her eyes were closed; I kissed her hard to wake her and then I cut my arm, above the wrist where my dress-sleeve would cover it. I held it to her mouth and she murmured; turned onto her side; sucked, too gentle, like a kitten born too early, that would not live to be drowned. 

'Take more.' I believe I was crying. 'Eat more, do not go to sleep—'

'Oh,' she said, drowsily, her mouth a mess, 'but I can't help it,' and she yawned again, hugely, and turned from me, and spoke no more. I shook her; pressed blood to her lips. She did not stir. I turned away from her for a moment only, to tie a strip of rag about my arm and wipe the furious tears from my eyes. When I turned back my bed was empty, and I was alone. 

I believe, after that night, I lost the last vestiges of my native caution. I lost any pretence I might have harboured to balance and rational thought. I wanted only to overcome—and more than that, to _know_ that which I overcame. The only force holding my mind and body together, was the conviction that, whatever the cost, they should not leave me unsatisfied. I scarce slept; I scarce ate. Every moment spent in the presence of my father and my guardians was a torment. And if I could not bring myself to deny _them_ , to deny Carmilla or the other woman when they came to me in the night, I no longer lost myself in their arms or lingered in their embraces but waited impatiently for their departure, so I might make note of all I had observed. I pored over my little library, over my careful notes of every reference and every hint either of them had ever dropped in my hearing. Witches; gargoyles; hags; incubi; succubi; bagienniks; aufhockers; moosfraülein. Everything I had ever observed of either of them. Everything I knew. 

This I knew: there was something that drew them to the churchyard in Karnstein. Something that kept them close, I suspected; something that tethered them. This I knew: there was something that bound them together. A kind of vicious motherhood that thwarted the child's growth; a kind of vicious childhood that fed forever at the breast. This I had observed: that when one of them waxed strong, the other waned weak; and the lassitude of the one fed the vitality of the other. This I suspected: that in neither of them could that vital energy dwell for long; that, like parasites, they fed it each to the other, the other to each; and occupied all their awful power in this circular pursuit. The fallen villagers, Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt, myself: we were merely the raw fiber to their self-binding ties. Strong fed into weak; weak into strong. It was as if they were but one quantity at the heart. When the lore spoke of vampires it spoke of soul-crimes; of unbearable grief; of the taking of one's own life. But if one creature, buckled under with pain, had out of the intensity of its agony grown a companion, or grown her _back_ ; and then bound her so tight she could never again get free…

For, this I did not know: what would pass if one or the other were to become so weak as to disappear? If someone were to snap that binding tie? Would the other be freed? Or destroyed? 

This I did not know: who was it, what was it, under the stones in the Karnstein churchyard? And if my father's friend the General, in response to an unsigned letter, were to storm upon it with implements of destruction; and if he were to expose the answers I sought, so that I should at last, beyond a shadow of a doubt, be satisfied; then who, and what, would remain?

## 1919

We separate at the theatre: she to the docks, I to my letters. Home, I say, but she understands what I mean. She always does. 

By the time I arrive back it is fully night, and cool. The breeze off the water: all-pervasive. I might wish for a wrap. Yet I linger in the little garden of the palazzo. Is it nine years since we came here? Ten? We watched the Comet Halley from that balcony; then stayed through the war. Strange time to leave, one might think: with the coming of peace. But for months I've felt the old restlessness gathering in me. And now I've said it: _Let's go to India_ ; so we will, before long. She may have already started making plans. She loves to surprise me. Command me to do things I've already told her I long for. But nostalgia takes me, every time, at the moment when I know I will move on. Ten years. The mossy fountain with its cracked cupid. The pale roses, nodding on their sun-burnt stems. 

I climb the stairs. Fetch my wrap from the bedchamber and open a door out onto the canal. The quiet of the palazzo is full of small sounds: the drapery shifting in the breeze; the click and flint of the lamp as I light it. The little flame flares, and settles. 

My letters await me in the bedchamber but I put the lamp down on the side table and rest on the settee. Eighteenth century: dark walnut, lavender silk. She'd fallen in love with it in the window of a shop off Campiello Pisani, and written to the proprietor begging him to open for a special appointment, after dark. We might have simply taken the thing. I believe she found the exercise a novel one. We carried it home between us, through the midnight alleys of Venice. This old girl, I think; and run my fingers down into the upholstery-seams, until I can feel the stitches slide against my skin. 

I am drowsy, now. Lazy. It isn't like me. I think of my letters, and the precious bit of time each night when I am alone. But a sense of luxuriousness overtakes me. I could fall asleep right here, I think. She will return before the dawn, and collect me. It is lovely, sometimes, that she watches over me. She is watching over me now, I think, after all; and blink up at the mantel as I turn on my side, cheek pressed to lavender silk. 

My father died believing the portrait had been destroyed, but of course she took it with her. She brought it with her to Rome, and hence with us to Vienna, and to Constantinople, and to Paris, and then here, to Venice, where my love looks down at me from the seventeenth century and from the hearth-stone of the palazzo which is still, for a little while yet, our home.

The breeze has cooled yet further, but my wrap is warm. I am warm. Cosy, as the English say. I look up at her, and smile; though I know I sometimes don't when she is really here. A painting, I think, is so much easier than a soul; and I close my eyes.

## 1871

Before I wrote to the General, I did not sleep. After I wrote to him, I _could_ not sleep.

I could hardly converse. I felt haunted; pursued. Every glance, every word from Carmilla, I dissected obsessively. Had she discovered what I had done? Had the other woman? They must, I felt; surely they must; they were ancient and powerful and for centuries their only preoccupation had been to protect the bond that held them together. Surely they could sense that they were feeding off a girl who plotted to sever it. Surely they could feel my every machination; could sense the threat, whenever I entered a room. Half the time I was convinced they knew, already, every move I'd made; and that their pretence of ignorance was a ploy to lure me into complacency while they put into place counter-measures to ensure their safety. At these times I was convinced that nothing would come of all my plans. How could it? Who was I, when compared with either one of them? How could I imagine that I might keep secrets from _her_? And indeed: what if she knew what I was about, but Carmilla did not? What might she do? Might she harm Carmilla, take Carmilla from me against her will? Then sometimes, on the contrary, I was convinced that while _she_ might remain in ignorance, Carmilla, living as she did in such close proximity to me and my anxious moods, had doubtless guessed at the cause of my worry. If that were the case, what would she do? Would she tell her 'Mama' what I was planning? Would she separate me from her?

At yet other times, I was convinced that neither of them knew, or even suspected. At these times a panic gripped me, as it had in the days after I had finished the first lure; and I wished by any means necessary to take back my letter. At night I lay awake and thought of ways to regain it. I could intercept the post, I thought. I could manufacture an excuse to pay a visit to the General's schloss, and steal it back. If I could only interrupt its journey, only destroy it, then nothing would happen. Everything would continue as it had done. Then I would not be guilty of any intentional betrayal; for as much as the death of Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt troubled my conscience, I had never wilfully done her ill. And even if I had done, it would not be the same: for Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt and I had never met; whereas with Carmilla, and with the other woman, I had lain only the night before, drugged with kisses, tingling with blood. To then turn about and consign one of them—both of them, perhaps—to the eternal flames—! When I thought of the act in these terms I knew beyond any hint of uncertainty that it was not within my abilities. I thought of my age, and my sex; my paltry education and my sparse social connexions; and I knew that I was simply not the sort of person who was capable of doing such a thing; being neither sufficiently heroic nor sufficiently hard-hearted for the work required. When I considered the way she had caressed the churchyard shrub, bold yet familiar… and Carmilla's little fingers, strong in my hair… 

Yet I did not move to put into action any of my plans to intercept the letter. I told myself I surely would. I told myself I knew myself, knew my conscience and my courage: the first would prevail, or the second would fail me, and in either case I would stop the letter's course. But knowing, as I supposed, that I would act, and soon, it was never imperative that my action be taken at quite _that_ moment, nor quite _that_ day. And, too, just as I had gathered my courage to run out along the forest path toward the General's schloss, to prevent the destruction of one or both of the objects of my obsession, I would be overcome with the conviction that it mattered not whether I acted or no, for surely they both knew of all my plans already, and would protect themselves—and if they did so, they would at last be forced to show their hands. Since, in the meantime, they conducted themselves as they always had done, betraying no sign that they had found me out, I resolved not to be the first to capitulate: I too would carry on in my accustomed way, and betray nothing to them of my anxiety.

And so I went on thus, from day to day. My face became pale, and my movements listless and distracted. My father noticed, and Madame Perrodon fretted; but I heeded neither their kind words nor my inner urgings to action. And gradually, I came to accept that my letter had certainly progressed out of the hands of the post-carrier; and gradually thereafter, that it had almost certainly been read by the General himself. That the clockwork I had wound up was now irretrievably set in motion; and that unless I happened upon some more doomed and desperate intervention than I had previously contemplated, its natural outcome would overcome us as a matter of course. 

It was on a night soon after this realisation, when I was, for once, in my bed both alone and asleep, when I was visited by a dream, vivid as day. A sweet voice, warm and sticky as if treacle poured into my ear, told me _beware the assassin_ ; and when I turned to look, there at the foot of my bed stood Carmilla, her white night-dress bathed from throat to foot in blood. 

I jolted awake. My heart, these days so sluggish, fairly beat out of my chest. I was discovered, I was positive. For what else could it mean? And yet: what _did_ it mean, I wondered, as I lit a taper with shaking hands. By whom had I been found out? Had _she_ discovered me, and in her rage at my betrayal murdered her Carmilla before I or the General could do so? Or was I found out by Carmilla herself? Galas and assassins, I remembered from that night weeks ago, lifetimes ago, under the moonlight. Was she repeating her old words to me as a kind of farewell? 

In bare feet, with a bare head, I tore along the corridor toward Carmilla's room. I know not what I intended to do; for she fastidiously locked her door, and I did not have a key. I only knew that I must find her out. That I must be close to her; to _her_ ; that I must pursue the answers to the questions filling my chest to bursting. If she had been taken—if she had _taken_ her and _left_ me—

I battered on her door. I scrabbled at the handle, but in vain. Mademoiselle De Lafontaine discovered me, screaming in the corridor, my face tear-soaked, my hand covered in candle-wax. _She has gone_ , I remember sobbing, _she has taken her_. No doubt I made any number of such indiscreet exclamations, and worse; I warrant I was saved from suspicion only by virtue of my sex, and—what is much the same in the general imagination—my hysterical condition. Mademoiselle De Lafontaine shepherded me back to my chamber, and cooed me into slippers and a dressing-gown. She turned away from me to ring for more servants, other servants, men; and in the moment of her distraction I unpinned the lure from my pillow, and pinned it to my night-gown, under my dressing gown. I was sobbing, still; I was shaking. I put my hand to my breast and pressed against the lure, again and again, as we followed the servants back down the corridor, and the men forced Carmilla's door. All I could think, all the time, was that I could not bear it. I _could not bear it_. Upon the exact nature of the thing I could not bear, I did not dwell. 

Her door swung open, then. She was not within. 

I had lost. 

I feel certain that if Mademoiselle De Lafontaine had not been holding me up in that moment, I should have collapsed. As it was my vision tunnelled and pressed against my skull. My breath became so loud it seemed to fill my entire skull. My companion gripped me, and I remained standing; but there were servant-men swarming about Carmilla's bedchamber, where she had lain, and she was far away. She had flown from me. She would never return. She had left me immured as always within these walls. 

I ran to the window, and looked down at the long lime walk. The moon was a waning crescent and I could scarce make out shapes beneath me. What moved, there? Was that a figure, all in black? I pressed the lure against my breast. Was it she? Could she feel it, when I pressed, like so? Could I swear it was not a barn-cat? That it was not a dog? Did she move away from me, skimming along the ground? 

Madame Perrodon arrived and attempted to calm me; to get me away from the window and feed me chocolate. I could not pretend. I knew not what to say. I escaped her grasp, and threw open the cupboards of Carmilla's room. I checked behind every door. Carmilla _could_ not be gone, I thought; I could not withstand it; and I pillaged the cupboards and the pantries all down that corridor, and the next. I could hear the servants' voices, still, though they grew fainter all the time. They called Carmilla's name. My pace outstripped them until I could no longer make them out. 

I threw myself in a linen cupboard, and pulled to the door. From between my night-dress and the dressing-gown I tore the lure. With a little jerk the pin came free of the charm. I put the charm between my teeth, and bit down, hard; then pulled up my sleeve and, like I had done once before as Carmilla went horribly soft and apathetic in my bed, I plunged the point of it into the flesh of my own arm. 

_You must not_ , I thought. I pulled back the pin and let the blood well up; then plunged it in again. In the heat and the closeness of the cupboard, I could smell the coppery scent; surely she could smell it as well. Surely they both could. I thought: _You shall not do this. You shall not leave me; you cannot._

Crouched in that dark cupboard in my father's schloss, with hot wetness running down my arm and my face, I was no doubt the picture of abjection and yet I felt—I felt incandescent. Had I not been so long accustomed to constant observation, I might have rent the air; might have charged out warrior-like in my fury, with my demands and my bloody hands and my hair all down. But I was more powerful for being forbidden. I crouched and cursed them both and with my blood drew them back to me; and the fury I could not release gathered in my chest and my stomach; and it curdled there; and it grew. The cupboard stank of blood and body. I drew my lips back from my teeth and bit down, bit down on the charm until I tasted arnica and rabbit's blood. I could see her, see the both of them: her tearing away from me, head held high in her black carriage until I _bit_ and her wheel on a birch-root _crack!_ ; and Carmilla, commanding, black waves down her back grown strong and radiant as she flew up the lime walk away from me and I _bit_ and she fell, fell at my feet in the grass of the schloss where she turned to me and her teeth, lengthening in her mouth, her hard little hand at my throat. _I'll stop_ , I would tell her, then, choked from between my teeth. _I didn't mean it, I'll stop it, I'll stop it happening and I'll have you, and have you, and have_ —

When I emerged from the cupboard I knew not day from night. I felt myself blazing. Burning. My feet scarce touched the ground. I tore toward her room, where I knew she would be. I knew it. I could see it in my mind's eye, incontrovertible: how the door would fly open before me and she would rise up; how furiously we would come together; how we should meet mouth to claw, wing to knee; teeth to breast to hoof to sabre; lighting up the night with our battle. I was a girl, and scorned. We should be one another's avenging angels. We should hear each other's confessions; we would purge each other's sins. Together we would triumph over my father, and the General, and Styria, and the world. I could see it all, like a vision: clear as the scarlet dripping all down my right hand. 

Carmilla was in her room. Just as I had foreseen.

She did not flinch to see me. At the sight of my wounds she neither drew back nor, as I'd half-expected, leapt forward, starved. She looked up at me, slow and indolent as of old, with a slight rise to her right eyebrow, and said, 'They'll see you.' _They'll see you_ : as one might chastise a child caught stealing a fish from the market. I dripped onto the rug before her fireplace. She sighed, and pushed herself up off her bed. In white she glided to me where I stood saying nothing; saying not a word. She took my arm. She touched and touched her tongue so delicately to my flesh that in less than a minute I was healed. I had wanted to tear out her heart with my teeth. She had not so much as smudged her night-dress. The General would arrive the next morning. I might never see her again. 

'Go,' she told me. I stood and blazed my rightful claim at her and 'Go,' she told me, waving her hand. 'Put your good family at ease.'

So I turned, and I went. With my lips pressed tight together I marched down the corridor, and I found my guardians and my faithful household servants and my kind father. And I told them that Carmilla had returned.

## 1919

When I awake she is standing over me. I do smile. For a wonder. 

She shifts my head and shoulders on the settee, and slides her legs under my cheek as she sits. My head re-settles in her lap. My hand finds her leg through her skirts, and she runs her fingers through my hair. From the absent feel of the motion, she is thinking of something else. Why now, I wonder, after decades of avoiding any mention of it? But then: no doubt decades feel like weeks, to her. Weeks already feel to me like days. I twist my neck up and she is gazing at the portrait, gazing down.

'What were you hoping for?' she says. She does not look at me. Her voice is steady. 'When you were watching them, with their shovels and their axes, tearing into the churchyard tomb. Was there something—someone—to whom you hoped to return? Was it her, or—or did you only think of knowing, one way or the other?'

I cannot answer.

'I loved you,' I say.

She smiles down at me, disbelieving. Almost pitying. The tears spring up in my eyes. 

'I love you,' I tell her, 'I love you, I loved you, I have always—' 

She stops my mouth with her hand. Bends down and kisses my cheek. In the lamp-light, her lips come away pink.

## 1871

In the carriage there were tears in the General's voice. I remember thinking: I ought to feel that. When his voice caught on the name _Rheinfeldt_ mine ought to catch in sympathy. And it would, later—much later—when, in my soiled rat's nest of a bed in Constantinople, I would spend months re-living that summer from the position of the General; and then months from the position of my father; and then months from the positions of Madame Perrodon and of Mademoiselle DeLafontaine; and then—sickening, refusing all food she brought me, both young and old, until she cut open her own wrist and held me still for it—months from the position of the farmer-woman who had straightened up from her weeding for a moment, just as our carriage passed. Her eyes had locked with mine. In Constantinople I would remember it, clear as a painting. I might still have changed things, then, I would repeat, over and over until the words grated my throat; and she would watch by my bedside. I would tell her: I could have called out to that woman, that farmer-woman. She could have helped me; surely there was _something_ we might have done. I would weep, and she would hold me, and it would change nothing. In years to come I would feel every pang of every injury of every person who had shared with me that postage-stamp of Styrian soil. 

But at the time I could not feel it. I could scarcely feel the presence of the General across from me; nor my father's form, concerned and incredulous, at my side. All of my energy was on the next bend; and the next bend; and the church in the deserted village; and what the men would do; and what the men would find; and what I should learn; and what I should destroy; and what I should gain. And then—

Outside the window the fields unwound. There was never, I had often thought, such a beautiful sylvan drive. But then, apart from that single week in Graz at ten years of age, I had spent my whole life within this five-mile radius of Styrian countryside. What did I know of beauty? I could not even recognise, yet, the anticipatory nostalgia which in the coming years would find me, always, when I stood on the brink of a leave-taking but had not yet cut my ties. I could not recognise the sensation because this was the first time I had ever felt it: sitting behind the box, twisting my hands in my lap, trying not to faint from terror while an old man poured out his heart, and metal clanked against metal by my feet.

**Author's Note:**

> The funeral hymn quoted is a Frederick Henry Hedge translation of the German "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott," or, in English, "A Mighty Fortress is Our God."
> 
> Apologies to Mary Shelley for _Frankenstein_ and, though this ended up being more oblique than I anticipated, to Toni Morrison for _Beloved_.


End file.
